


Ghost Rider: Fallen Angel

by SeverelyLtd



Category: Ghost Rider (2007), Nicolas Cage's Whole Vibe in General
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:34:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23853133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeverelyLtd/pseuds/SeverelyLtd
Summary: Years after GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE, Johnny Blaze is once again in hiding, trying to tame the eldritch force within him.When a specter from Ghost Rider's past returns, Johnny Blaze must contend with the consequences of Zarathos's past cruelties.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 6





	1. Prologue

Prologue:

1888 – Borland, New Mexico

They bring the woman forward, this mob of frontiersmen, torches, pitchforks in hand. The night is orange with their fire, hot with their anger, so hot that it rolls off them in waves. Father John can feel it, stinging at his face, scraping, the smoke acrid and making his eyes water. He glances up, blinking back tears. The stars are gone from the sky.

“Let her go!” John says, but the men do not respond. “Let her go, she’s not an animal!”

In response, one of the men, Roger Smith, spits in the witch’s face, and kicks her so hard that her gasping, wheezing breath cuts through the angry yells of the crowd. Silence falls as she retches and chokes on the ground. John takes it in in an instant. Her dress is torn, her back covered in bruises and scratches. Where her skirts have been ripped, he can see blood and filth running down her legs.

"What did you do?” John says. “What in the name of _God_ …”

“ _God_ is exactly why we brought her here,” Roger says. “This cunt’s had the devil in her!”

The men cheer their agreement.

“What do you mean?” John says. “This woman is…”

“She’s a slut, and a whore, and she’s sold herself to the devil himself,” Roger says. “You know as well as I do, Father! Look at her!”

He reaches down and with savage strength, twists her hair in his hands and wrenches her face up into the light. John does recognize her. Cassandra. One of the whores who works at Madame MacMurray’s saloon. She’s always friendly to John, always kind, always gentle. And yet, John cannot help but think of the sins she must have committed, willingly, taking pleasure in them. Even now, even seeing her tormented by these savages he calls his parish, he finds himself thinking of her sins.

“Sh-she’s not a witch,” John says at last. “There’s no evidence of any such thing, and even if she _was_ , we live in _civilized_ times.”

He straightens his back, imagines he’s standing at a pulpit, he prays that God will speak through him, that his words will calm the crowd.

“We have courts, we have judges, we have juries,” John says. “Do not derelict your duty to the law, of man or God!”

The crowd murmurs, Roger drops Cassandra to the ground.

“So,” Roger says. “She’s got her claws in you?”

“I…,” John steps back, puzzled, and the heat of the torches is hot on his face. “What? What are you talking about?”

“You’re standing between us and doing what we _all know_ is right,” Roger says. “So, now I’m thinking of why. What’s she done to you?”

“She hasn’t done…,” John says, “We haven’t done…”

“I’ll do the same to you as I did to her,” Roger says, lips peeling back in a grin as the men around him shift uncomfortably. “So tell me…”

John takes another step back, the heat from the flames is _burning_ him, and he can’t think, he can’t even breathe. Roger yanks Cassandra up again, and she screams.

“Is this cunt a witch, or isn’t she?”

John looks at Cassandra, bleeding from a cut on her nose, face streaked with dirt and tears, eyes pleading and glistening. Her hands scrabble against Roger’s, trying to pry them away, and her feet kick, tangled in her skirts, raising a cloud of dust. John sees the dark prints of strong hands on her throat, imagines himself being throttled by those same hands, imagines his own blood spilling in the dirt, imagines all these men taking their turn at beating him until his body is broken.

“Yes,” he whispers. “She’s… she’s a witch.”

“And she’s laid with the devil,” Roger says.

“And she’s laid with the devil,” John says.

“And by God’s own law, we must see her burned,” Roger says.

“And by…,” John’s throat seizes shut. “And by God’s own law, we must see her burned.”

And the fire grows hotter than ever, swirling through the air, as the men scream and cheer and chant, and they drag Cassandra through the town as she screams, spitting on her when she struggles, kicking her. John is swept along with the crowd, and more than once sees men reaching down to grope at her breasts. She kicks and thrashes until two men pick her up by the ankles, and two more by the wrists, and they carry her, writhing and spread-eagled to a pyre they’ve built at the edge of the town.

“Too bad,” John hears someone mutter. “She was the best ride in town.”

Someone laughs in response, and John can only look away, he can only close his eyes.

“No!” Cassandra screams, and John can’t look. He hears it all, hears wood splintering, hears as they drag her on top of the pine logs. He hears the tearing of cloth, Cassandra’s whimpering voice. “Won’t somebody help me?!”

She’s screaming, and there’s only laughter in reply.

John keeps his eyes down, glancing through the crowd, smiling, horrible, angry, all these faces, enraged and distant and full of a twisted joy he cannot understand. He looks up, and sees Cassandra, naked and bloody, lashed to a post.

“She burns!” Roger says. “In the name of Valefar, she burns!”

 _In the name of…_ who _?_ is all John can think.

“To the flames we give her,” Roger says, “to the Duke below, we give a child, give to us in turn by her father above!”

“No,” John whispers, but none can hear it. They’re changing, screaming, screeching in a tongue he cannot understand.

John shoves his way through the crowd, pushes past people, trips, picks himself up, but the pyre never seems any closer.

“To the great lion who is a man,” Roger says, “we give this flesh.”

“Stop it!” John says. “Stop! STOP! _STOP_!”

And the fires go out.

Roger, silhouetted against the blue of the night sky twists and turns, the words dead in his throat. Cassandra continues to cry. The men stop their chanting, and the words John hears are plain English.

“What happened?”

“Did it work?”

“Are we rich?”

And then fire.

Far away, but approaching fast.

“Is that him?”

“It worked! It worked!”

“That’s Valefar?”

“I was imagining something more…”

“I thought it was a lion.”

“Right, and look!”

The bobbing fire in the distance is close enough now to see that it’s a being, wreathed in flame, four legs, sprinting across the desert sands. But John is watching more closely than the rest. John doesn’t assume he knows what it is, and even as the men begin to cheer and shout, even as Roger raises his arms, hooting victory to the air, John sees that this is no lion.

It’s a horse.

And upon it, a rider.

“Valefar! Valefar! We’ve summoned you,” Roger cries out across the plains. “And now, we bind you! Now you will show us the way to…”

A burst of light in the distance.

Roger’s head snaps back, a streak of fire and sparks trailing from his ruined skull. Roger falls on the pyre and doesn’t move.

Cassandra screams, and thrashes with renewed desperation against her ropes.

And then the cold thunder of a rifle-shot echoes across the plains.

A horse and a rider, now they can all see it. They can see the sphere of flames on the horse, growing closer and closer. They’re shifting, glancing at each other, not knowing what to do. John pushes past them in their daze and mounts the pyre. It’s sticky with sap, sharp with splinters, but he manages to crawl over the top edge. The rider is upon the town, and John knows that he cannot look.

“ _You,”_ a dreadful voice says, a whisper seeping from the ground like a hundred voices from hell. _“Evil men.”_

John squints at the knots that keep Cassandra bound, and picks at them with his fingers. They’re shaking to much to be of any use.

 _“Evil men reek,”_ the voice continues to whisper, and the rider is circling. John looks his way, and wishes he hadn’t.

The rider’s head is like no human head he has seen. It’s a skull, with eye sockets deep and empty, a jaw moving, _speaking_ , and with each word a puff of embers and ash.

“The knife,” Cassandra’s voice says, small and very close.

“What?” John says, for the skull’s hollow eyes are staring into his, his stomach dropping, the rest of the world following, and all he sees is the _fire_. The eye sockets aren’t empty at all. They’re _full_. They’re _overflowing_ with an absence that’s reaching out and reminding John of every horrible thing he’s ever done. What business does he have being a priest?

All at once, he realizes it. What business does he have?

He’s an evil man. As evil as all the rest.

“Rog’s knife,” Cassandra says, more loudly.

 _“The sins of this world are upon all of you,_ ” the rider says. _“And I’ve come to take the devil’s due.”_

From the rider’s hands drops a chain, red hot and dripping with flames.

“GET HIS FUCKING KNIFE AND CUT ME LOOSE!” Cassandra screams, and the chain whips forward. A man on the edge of the crowd is gone in a burst of flames, in a scream that echoes and continues long after he is nothing but ash on the ground.

The sight snaps John back to reality, and he looks down. In Roger’s belt is a knife, cruel and sharp, so bright that John can almost hear its keening edge. He pulls it out of the belt, and hacks at Cassandra’s rope. They come apart like uncoiling snakes.

The rider’s horse rears up, and the chain whips in a wide circle. Its tip wraps around a man’s leg, and he’s dragged to the ground as the horse comes back down. His leg is gone, and his scream joins the first. And then another scream, and another and another, as the rider charges into the crowd.

That horrible skull darts this way and that, the mouth open and belching fire and smoke. The men gather themselves, the _evil men_ , and they charge back at the rider, swarming over him, coming away clutching at stumps of burning hands, clothes smoldering, faces stained with white ash. But when twenty men swarm the rider, they drag him off his horse, and the horse wheels and kicks away from him.

“Let’s _go_!” Cassandra says. Her hand grasps John’s, and she pulls him away from the scene, across the pyre, down the other side.

“Y-your clothes,” John says.

“Fuck my clothes, I’d rather have my _life_.”

John turns, in time to see a burst of flame, a mushroom cloud of thick, black smoke, glowing from within, and the rider is back on his feet, looking their way.

 _“You can’t run from me_ ,” the voice is saying, the whisper now a scream, and beneath it, a sound of grinding stones that sounds almost like laughter. _“You think you can_ run _, John?”_

“Yes we fucking can,” Cassandra pulls his arm, but he’s frozen, staring.

 _“I CAN FOLLOW YOUR STINK TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH,”_ the rider screams, “ _FLESH AND GUILT AND ROT IN YOUR SOUL!”_

One of the men jams his pitchfork into the rider’s ribcage. The rider turns, fixes him with a glare, and the man springs back. Without a sound, the man reaches up to his eyes, and John watches as his fingers, his filth-caked nails, bury themselves in his eyelids. He hears the man’s animal scream, and watches as the blood flows and flows and flows, as the man pulls his hands away from his eye-sockets, clutching fistfuls of red pulp that leak between his fingers, two empty holes left behind. He’s screaming, he’s screaming, he’s _screaming_ when the rider draws a pistol from his belt and sends a bolt of fire through man’s chest.

“ _Filth_ ,” the rider says, and spits a stream of fire on the corpse.

Cassandra pulls away from John, shouting at him to follow. The rider aims, cocks the flaming skull that sits on his shoulders to one side. He lowers his gun.

 _“Run, then_ ,” the rider says. _“And always remember. You gave her to them. You gave her up. Always remember._ ”

Their eyes meet, and John knows that he always will.

**Ghost Rider: Fallen Angel**


	2. Two-Lane Blacktop

2020 – The Salton Sea, California

Day or night, the voice of vengeance whispers in his ear. And every so often, Johnny Blaze can’t help but listen. It whispers today, as he’s crouched beside his motorcycle, tuning it up after the damage sustained in his last outing. A battle in a warehouse, somewhere far away. Flashes of a violent night, Johnny fading in and out in the frantic dance of possession and control. The memories hazed over, everything bleeding together in a mess of fire and retribution. Sometimes, Johnny asks: _Is this all there is? Is this all we can do?_

And Zarathos, the voice of vengeance that is always within him replies, _What else do you want?_

 _Justice,_ Johnny thinks, he prays.

_That’s not our jurisdiction, is it?_

_But wouldn’t it be…_

_That’s not our responsibility. What are we?_

_The Ghost Rider,_ Johnny sighs. Soon he feels he will forget his own name.

_What do we do?_

_We avenge the righteous who have been hurt by the wicked._

_So what will we do?_

Johnny doesn’t reply. He can smell something nearby. The smell of rotting flesh, sickly and heavy on the air that he now recognizes as the stink of sin and iniquity. He came to the Salton Sea in the hopes that the stink of rotting fish on the sea’s receding shores would cover it up, but this smell runs deeper. He smells it with his soul, not with his nose. The smile feels terrible as it spreads across his face, and he clamps a hand over his mouth. He knows that the rigor mortis grin is the first step of the transformation, and tonight, he doesn’t feel like transforming. He feels like being flesh and blood.

He feels like working on his motorcycle, and then having a beer and watching something dumb on TV.

But the _smell_ that rides the wind, that wraps itself around him like a miasma… Johnny feels his lips parting, his teeth long and gnashing and bare, and the spirit of vengeance whispers again:

_Johnny? What will we do?_

“I guess,” Johnny says. “We’ll just have to do our _job._ ”

And like that, the skin of his hands goes orange, burning like paper, and his muscles peel back as embers and boiling fat and meat drip away from him to reveal bones, smoking and sparking and igniting. Johnny feels his cheeks peeling back. He feels his flesh vanishing into flame, forcing a horrible grin as his teeth emerge from his skull. He feels his skull transforming, teeth growing longer, eye sockets getting deeper, brow ridge growing sharper, and his human sight vanishes and in its place comes a glowing, roiling vision of a world beneath the world, and that’s the last thing he knows as Johnny Blaze.

The smell is overwhelming now.

The world is a festering, rotting corpse, full of sin and death.

He is the Ghost Rider.

And the time has come for him to ride again.

Beside him, the hell-cycle trembles with anticipation, its eight cylinders growling and roaring, revving with the sound of brimstone cascading from the heavens. The fire is so bright and hot that the air seems to blacken around it.

Johnny hears himself scream and cackle, his voice screeching like a thousand bats swarming from the mouth of a slavering cretin in the depths of hell. He swings aboard the hell-cycle and twists the throttle. The hell-cycle takes off, bursting through the patchwork double doors of Johnny Blaze’s garage. The stink is all around him, but it comes stronger from the south.

Ghost Rider spins his hell-cycle around, leaving an arc of flaming tarmac in his wake. His rear wheel spins, burning rubber and asphalt into a cloud of smoke, and then it finds traction, and Ghost Rider is away, speeding down the two-lane blacktop.

They have been together a long time, Zarathos and Johnny Blaze. Perhaps too long for Zarathos to remember that he was not always like this. Long ago, he had been silent, efficient, a being of focus and reserve. Ever since being bonded to Johnny Blaze however, Ghost Rider has become an entity of reckless abandon. As the two beings who are one speed down the highway, they lean back on the handlebars, flaming skull cackling at nothing but the sheer rush of the road and the desert wind.

They shift their weight, sending the motorcycle off the road. Beneath them its shape begins to flow. The seat raises, the wheels draw closer together, the suspension lengthens. The body shrinks, until the hell-cycle is no longer an eight-cylinder monstrosity, but a nimble dirt-bike. It no longer belches flame and smoke in vast clouds, but instead draws them in a thin stream through the heat haze of the desert, like a whip slashing through the sound barrier.

Train tracks, raised on a long mound of earth, run parallel to the road, on the other side of which is a stretch of desert and another highway. They’re close now, the evil men that make this stink. They’re coming. And Ghost Rider will be there to meet them. He brings his bike at an acute angle to the tracks, and urges the hell-cycle on. It answers his thoughts, and with an angry buzz, it kicks and bucks beneath him and shoots forward. The earthen hill of the train-tracks is a perfect ramp, and with a blaze of fire, the hell-cycle sails through the air.

Johnny Blaze knows that he’s invulnerable. He’s been run over by a cement truck and walked away. He’s been buried alive in molten steel and swam his way out. He’s been punched so hard that he left the atmosphere, and landed back in earth ready to fight again, as soon as he climbed his way out of the thirty foot crater. Yet still, this thrills him, and he feels his heart stop for a moment, and he feels breath catch in his throat. The moment of flight, of weightlessness, with the world far below. The roar of wind and flames, the brilliance of the sun shining overhead.

He can’t help but let go of the handlebars for a moment letting the hell-cycle fall away from him. He twists backwards, flips once, twice, and catches hold of the hell-cycles handlebars once more. The harmony of several V8s running together creeps into the periphery of his senses. The arc of his jump is declining.

He sees them, coming down the highway. Eight motorcycles, surrounding a pick-up truck. A driver and a passenger. The truck is towing a horse trailer, and inside… Ghost Rider can’t tell yet. A life form, certainly, but its scent is overwhelmed by everything around it.

Long ago, Ghost Rider was fascinated by the scent of sin, by the infinitely nuanced variations that were possible. At first, he had done his best to keep track of it all – to recognize the scent of someone who had caused more harm than someone else, to savor the scent of heinous motivations, to compare that to the slightly sweeter smell of inadvertent harm. But after all these years, he was done with that. Whatever variations, the smell was really just the same.

He's among them before they know what’s happening. The hell-cycle reverts with a sudden explosion of molten metal to its base form, a monstrous chopper powered by a throbbing V8.

A flaming chain whips into existence in one hand. Swirling his arm, Ghost Rider brings it circling over his head like a lasso. It trails flame and heat and fear, and the mouth of his skull bursts open in a horrible grimace of dripping embers. One of the bikers falls beneath the chain, twisting, torn apart by asphalt before anyone knows what’s happening.

“Jesus _Shit!_ ” another one screams, and his bike’s front wheel tangles into the wreckage of his friend, and he goes sailing, flipping end over end through the air.

Ghost Rider roars and flings his chain out to catch him. It wraps around him as he spins, and with an angry yank, the flaming spirit of vengeance slams him down into the highway, hard enough to drive his head down into his shoulders with a crunch.

“Motherfucker!” a scream comes from behind him. Ghost Rider whips his head around, in time to see a biker swooping in next to him, a sawed of shotgun held like a lance in his direction. Eight cylinders roar and the biker swerves towards him. Ghost Rider feels the crunch of the barrel lodging itself between his skull and his vertebrae, and it only makes him smile. The biker pulls the trigger, sending a 12-gauge slug straight through his spine. Or, it would have gone straight through his spine if his bones weren’t infused with the energy of angelic retribution. Instead, the shotgun’s barrel bursts apart, twisting out of the biker’s hands. The force is enough to twist the Rider’s head around, but now he brings it back, slowly, bones sliding and clicking back into place.

The Rider grins.

The biker tries to swerve away, but Ghost Rider reaches out and snatches the back of his bandana-clad head. He leans to his left, dragging the man off his bike as he screams, flaming skeletal fingers digging into his skull, so soft, so mortal. And then Ghost Rider leans hard to the right and plants the biker’s face into the ground, holding it there until his hands feel rough asphalt rushing past. Behind him, a hundred yards of blood and bone smeared across the desert highway like so much roadkill.

Two more converge on him, one of them swinging a chain of his own, aiming for Ghost Rider’s front wheel. The fiery avenger pulls back on his handlebars and balances on the rear wheel, and the chain slashes harmlessly at the road. The biker rams into Ghost Rider, and their faces come close. Too close. For a moment, they’re nose to nose, and Ghost Rider’s gazes is without mercy.

_A woman, a bar, a broken bottle, cutting her from ear to ear for laughing at his latest try-hard tattoo._

“Wretch,” Ghost Rider spits, and breaks eye contact.

“No, no, _no, NO!”_ the biker screams and veers off the road, throwing himself from his motorcycle into the dunes. Ghost Rider watches as he claws at himself for a switchblade, as he whips it out and stabs it through one cheek and begins sawing his way through, bloody and screaming, jaw slowly coming loose.

The other sees what’s happening, keeps his distance, raises a handgun. He empties the magazine into Ghost Rider’s back. Ghost Rider swerves in front of him and sends a pyroclastic blast from his exhaust pipes, melting flesh off bones. Three are left, and the truck driver.

The truck swerves from side to side, and the three bikers in front peel off, dropping back to engage Ghost Rider. One of them glances back in time to see a chain whip forward like a snake. His face bursts out of the back of his head, and he falls with a fist-sized tunnel through his skull. The truck’s passenger leans out of his window, assault rifle hoisted awkwardly in Ghost Rider’s direction. Ghost Rider leans forward and snatches another biker off their seat. With one hand, he holds him aloft, with the other he twists the throttle.

The assault rifle’s chatter splits the wind as they bear down on the truck. The body in Ghost Rider’s hand shudders and goes limp, blood wicking off and splattering Ghost Rider’s face, evaporating in the same instant. With an angry heave, the spirit hurls the biker towards the truck. It knocks the passenger out of the window, and both go twisting beneath the truck’s wheels.

The last biker, to his credit, doesn’t run. He draws a massive machete from the sheath on his back and comes in swinging, Ghost Rider ducks his first blow, and then raises his arms to block the machete as it returns on the backswing. The blade turns to dust in his flames. Ghost Rider nudges his hell-cycle to the left, sends the biker careening off the road, into a rock. Nothing rises from the wreckage but smoke and flame.

He urges the hell-cycle forward and pulls up alongside the driver-side window.

“Pull over,” he says.

“Like _fuck_ I will!” is the only response. That and a shotgun, jammed out the window.

Buckshot peppers him with dots of metal. Ghost Rider tears the gun free from the human hands and flips it around. A bony finger curls around the trigger.

“Not asking again,” he says.

The truck pulls over, coasting to a halt on a chorus of screaming breaks and hissing pneumatics. Before Ghost Rider can say anything, the door opens, and a man comes stumbling out. Dressed like the rest of the bikers, same leather vests, same insignia on the back. The Dogs of Hell. His face is young, though, blistering and shining with fresh acne. His beard is patchy, soft. Eyes wide and terrified. Ghost Rider stares into them.

_A group standing in a circle, kicking at him while he hunches against it, gritting his teeth, weathering the pain. A bucket of reeking shit, upended over his head. A chorus of laughter._

_Let him go,_ Johnny thinks. _Look at his face. He’s young. He won’t cause any more trouble. Just let him-…_

Zarathos grunts and Johnny sees:

_A girl, fourteen, six years his junior. Pregnant._

His fingers squeeze, and the shotgun blasts a load of buckshot into the boy’s face at point blank range.

“What face?” Zarathos growls.

 _Fuck!_ Johnny rages against him, strains against the flaming skull that has overtaken him. The ribcage, glistening with embers and roasting human meat, is like a prison. A heart, greasy and dripping long streams of fire, beating harder, harder. _You didn’t have to do that._

Zarathos stares at the body in front of him, and he shrugs.

“Rapist,” the spirit says and spits a stream of fire. “Vengeance. Easy enough.”

Johnny has no answer. For a moment, they are two beings once more, resenting each other’s presence. With slow even strides, they make their way towards the back of the trailer, heavy boots crunching through the gravel on the side of the road. The keening screech of a red-tailed hawk echoes through the crackling of the truck’s hot engine, through the oppressive heat and silence of the high desert. The rotting-fish smell is gone, but the trailer? It smells of something else. Something neither Johnny nor Zarathos can quite place. It isn’t the scent of a righteous soul. It isn’t the undeniable pleasure, the measure of peace that settles over him in the presence of those very few ( _so very few_ ) that passed muster with the eldritch laws by which Zarathos takes stock of morality.

Instead it’s… an absence. They can hear it now, a voice whimpering, near-panic. One set of lungs, one hoarse throat, heaving breaths rising and falling, inside the trailer. Even as they listen, it begins to settle, to calm itself. The scent… Nothing. A life-form, void of both sin and virtue.

 _Well what the hell is this?_ Johnny thinks.

“We’ll find out,” Ghost Rider reaches forward and wrenches the trailer door open.

Inside, a young woman. She’s dressed in a white tank-top, cut-offs, cowboy boots. Her hair is disheveled and dirty. Her eyes are wide and ready, but he doesn’t see the wildness of fear within them. Ghost Rider sees readiness, and a wolf’s hunger. In one hand, she clutches an ornate dagger. In the other, a thin rod of iron, carved with runes and insignias that Ghost Rider can’t quite place. The dagger is held defensively, the iron rod is pointed in his direction.

“Oh, fuck,” the woman says. “It’s _you_.”


	3. Prime Beef

**Chapter 3: Prime Beef**

2020 – The Twirling Tassel

The bar is a well-known hangout. Not for actual Dogs of Hell. They spend their time in their fortresses, their compounds of trailer-parks, networks of drug labs prone to explode, and mobile-home brothels prone to being sites of grisly crimes. The Twirling Tassel is instead well-known for serving the adolescents vying for initiation into the gang. Here, they come to play at being hard, they come to rehearse the motions that will one day be their life. They come to brawl and threaten, and shout off-color threats at the women who worked there, only to laugh when the girls scurry away half in tears.

In a motel room, the man prepares himself. He opens up a simple wooden case, reveals a row of antique watches. Each is labeled with something like: 50M – Gangster (Russian Tattoos); 32M – Dockworker; 26F – Paralegal. Identities stolen from people he’s met, faces and details, scents, touches, remembered and recalled through intricately worked glamours. The clockwork components are key – each gear inscribed with holy symbols that aligned into new combinations with every tick. A method that circumvents most forms of magical detection. The man selects a cheat digital watch marked 20M – Marine. This particular face was stolen from a drunken marine in Japan, reeling through the streets of Okinawa. He slips it on his wrist and looks at himself in the mirror. He sees a skinny kid. Scrawny, sinewy, ready to scrap, with an arrogant dusting of patchy facial hair and close-cropped hair.

He dresses himself in ratty jeans, a white t-shirt, an unadorned leather vest. He tucks a bowie knife into his belt at his right side, and a coiled rosary on his left. Into one boot, he slips a wooden wand, short and stubby and practically twitching with aggressive energy.

“My name is Ribeye,” he grunts to himself in the mirror. “Yeah, fuck you, like the steak. I’m fucking _prime_ beef.”

At the Twirling Tassel, he finds more or less what he was expecting to find. A timeless place, an archetypal location, a bar, a tavern, a festering house of vice and sin, a wretched hive of scum and villainy. He swings his pick-up into an empty spot in the gravel parking lot and takes a moment to enjoy the desert air. Above, the stars are shining in their familiar patterns, undisturbed by the sound of revving motors and the muffled music thumping from the bar. The man – Ribeye for now – steps out of his truck. His boots crunch across the gravel, a dull orange in the buzzing streetlights. Each step brings him closer to the bar’s saloon doors, closer to the porch where a few men are leaning back against the bar’s outer wall, smoking.

The scent of the smoke is sharp and unfamiliar.

“Hey,” he calls out. “I’m looking for someone.”

Nobody replies, but one man – older, bearded – glances his way.

“I said,” Ribeye says again. “I’m looking for someone.”

The beard takes a long drag off the joint between his fingers, and grins: “Feel free to get lookin’.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder.

The man sighs, and steps through the doors of the Twirling Tassel. He feels his eyes making a circuit of the room, taking in its geography, its general layout. To his right is a long bar, two women with half their tits hanging out work behind it, scurrying back and forth and looking slightly shaken. To his left, the room opens up. A wide area of tables, and then a few alcoves with pool tables and pinball machines. Broken televisions hang in the corners. Everything is vaguely rustic, with exposed beams and pillars of unfinished wood holding everything together. He picks through the faces, cataloguing them away, drifting past all the male faces, looking for…

She isn’t here. This is where they were supposed to meet. And now…

“Fuck,” he sighs, and approaches the bar.

One of the women drifts towards him.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m looking for someone. Blonde, about five-foot-five…”

“Big tits, nice ass?” the woman sighs. “You and everyone else in this dive. Can’t help you there. What are you drinking?”

“She would have been a new face,” Ribeye presses on. “She probably would have been looking for work?”

“Work?” the bartender is immediately suspicious. She glances up and down the bar, sees that nobody is paying attention to their conversation. “What kind of work?”

“Normal work,” Ribeye shrugs. “Bartending, waitressing, y’know…”

The woman hesitates, then shakes her head.

“Nobody’s come by.”

“Listen,” Ribeye says. “She might be in trouble, and I’m supposed to be looking out for her, so anything you can tell me…”

“What are you, a cop?” the bartender says, raising her voice a little. Someone next to Ribeye side-eyes him, then goes back to his half-empty mug of beer. “I don’t talk to pigs.”

“I’m not…” Ribeye grimaces, “Listen, I’m about the furthest thing you can get from a cop. I’m just looking out for my own, surely that’s something you can understand.”

“Don’t call me… never mind,” the bartender says, and bites her lip, and Ribeye fixes his gaze on her, not sure if he’s pleading with her or trying to hypnotize her“Oh, whatever. Fine. About a week ago, this girl came by, seemed real taken with the… with the types that hang out around here. Wouldn’t listen to me when I said they were dangerous.”

“Yeah,” Ribeye says. “Sounds like her.”

“Said her name was Liz, said she was looking for paying work,” the bartender goes on. “I said we could take her on day-to-day, scrubbing out toilets, cleaning the kitchen, that kind of thing. She seemed in a bad way, she took it.”

A moment of hope. Perhaps she was just out of sight, cleaning up some mess.

“Is she here tonight?”

“No,” the bartender shrugs. “Just yesterday, someone rolled through that really sparked her interest, and she rode out with him around lunch.”

“And who was it?” Ribeye says.

Before the bartender can say anything, the man beside him slams his mug down on the bar. Heavy, loud, meant to interrupt.

“Don’t you say another goddamn word, bitch,” he growls. Ribeye looks his way, sizes him up and down. There’s a bulge at his waistband, his shirt hanging over it in an unsuccessful attempt to hide it. The grip of a knife is in plain view, and Ribeye has no doubts that it can be out and working in a split second.

“Butt out, this is no business of yours,” Ribeye says.

The man looks at him and begins to laugh. Ribeye can’t help but tense as he feels the laughter spread through the room. Slowly, everyone falls silent, until all that’s left is this man, and his laughter going on and on until it dies out in silence.

“No business of mine,” the man chuckles. “You dumb fuck.”

Ribeye shifts one foot back and glances over his shoulder. People between him and the door are closing ranks. Too many people to fight.

“This is exactly my business,” the man says. “I’m Howard fucking Tassel.”

“Tassel is your…” Ribeye can’t keep the surprise from his voice, “that’s your _name_?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Howard Tassel says. “You surprised?”

“Well,” Ribeye shrugs. “Sure. I thought it was, y’know…” He twirls his fingers near his nipples and grins at the faces assembled around the room. Tough crowd. Nobody even smirks in return.

“Then I’m learning a thing or two about you,” he says, raising his voice for all to hear. “You sure as hell aren’t a candidate for any of the clubs around here, because any one of them would know who I am.”

The sweaty mass of armed men and the boys that aspire to one day be like them nods and murmurs in assent. Ribeye scans the crowd again. The women are gathering around the edges of the scene, the boys are pushing forward, eager for blood. The men are hanging back, eyes on Howard. They’re all practiced at this, the younger ones not so much. No discipline. Untested. If Ribeye can make an example of some of them, the rest might scatter… leaving only the men and Tassel.

But then again, Tassel is close.

_If I can just get to him first…_

“So I’m sitting here,” Tassel says, “in _my_ bar, practically my _home_ , and I hear someone that I know isn’t a member of a club, and I know isn’t a candidate for any of the clubs, asking a lot of questions. You know what that makes me think?”

“That maybe you aren’t the thinking sort?” Ribeye says, and thinks to himself, _Keep him talking._

Tassel laughs, “No, see it kinda has me thinking that you’re a cunt fuck of a pig.”

“A cop?”

“Yeah,” Tassel says. “So, last chance to tell me if you are.”

“I’m not a cop,” Ribeye says. “Swear to God.”

“I didn’t think so,” Tassel says, “Because any cop would know… telling us you’re a cop might have saved your life.”

And he nods.

Ribeye moves faster than anyone else. He grabs the empty mug from in front of Tassel and spins in time to see someone lunging for him. He swings the mug into the side of someone’s head, and the glass shatters. It doesn’t do much against his attacker, who only roars, veins popping out of the sides of his head. Two thick, rough hands clamp around Ribeye’s throat, and he finds himself swinging through the air, legs limp as the air leaves his body. The biker slams him against the bar, and Ribeye’s arm finds an opening. He slashes upwards with the broken glass and stabs it into the biker’s armpit. He draws it out in a spray of blood, and stabs again and again, until the man is slumped against him, and blood is leaking everywhere.

Before he can catch his breath, a throng of hands reaches forward to pull the corpse away from him, hollering for blood. Ribeye scrambles backwards, and rolls over the bar. As he goes, he reaches for the wand in his boot. He comes back up to his feet, holding it with practiced ease, pointing at the nearest face.

“What the fuck kind of Harry Potter bullshit,” the face says, and Ribeye thrusts it forward, brushing his thumb along a rune on the grip. The air ripples, and the biker’s head snaps back. Everyone around him stumbles, reeling as something unseen and powerful like a jet engine stirs through the air, building and building, and…

Ribeye throws himself to the ground, tossing the wand into the air as he goes. The wood bursts, and the energy is released in a sudden torrent. A screeching wail echoes through the bar, as people scream and fly in a sudden rush of wind. Tables and chairs and pool equipment lift up into the air, a sudden swirling vortex of soft bodies and things that can easily penetrate soft bodies. Ribeye crawls to the end of the bar, towards the front door.

Above him, behind him, all around him, come screams, and the sound of wood shattering against wood. A scream arcs towards him on the vortex, and is suddenly cut short. An eight ball smashes into the bottles of tequila and whiskey behind the bar, and drops with a thud a few inches from Ribeye’s hand. It’s slick with blood. Ribeye’s fingers snatch at it, slip, then grasp it and he thrusts it into the left pocket of his vest.

At the end of the bar, Ribeye hauls himself up to his feet, pressing himself against the bar and holding on for dear life while the whirlwind rages. It’s only after a moment of standing there, panting, that he realizes:

The bearded biker fills the doorway, the only exit, eyes wide and wild. In his left hand, he holds a gun, in the other a half-burnt joint, still trailing a calm line of smoke.

“Fucking what the _fuck_ are you guys putting in these damn things?” he screams at nobody in particular, and he swings his gun across the room. It stops on Ribeye, and he takes one final puff of his joint. The beard splits to reveal another ferocious grin. “Find what you’re looking for?”

“No,” Ribeye mutters. “Everyone’s being maddeningly unhelpful.”

And he throws himself to the ground again a split second before the bearded biker opens fire. The shots come slowly, randomly, as if the biker has to re-learn how to work a gun with every new shot. Above him, bottles of alcohol burst, glass and booze raining down over him, slicing his arms and making them burn. He reaches the opposite end of the bar, and the spell comes to an end.

Ribeye throws himself over the bar, and a bullet splinters the wood in his wake.

“Come on, mother _fuckers_ ,” he hears the bearded biker screaming, still near the front door.

The interior of the bar is destroyed, but those who haven’t been impaled by bits of broken chairs and tables and pool cues, are already recovering, rising, reaching under their vests for guns and knives and whatever else they’re going to use to carve Ribeye to bits.

_Prime beef. Fuck me._

He dashes through the kitchen, dodging his way past a confused cook. He spots a hallway, a door. _Escape._ Ribeye throws himself down the hallway on panicked feet. He knows he needs to calm down, knows he needs to start _thinking_ again, but another gunshot seems to shatter the hallway to pieces.

A sharp yank on the door, and he finds himself staring at the inside of a walk-in fridge. Shelves lined with moldy fruits and vegetables glower at him, a bin of putrid meat leers up at him. Trapped.

Ribeye spins around, but people have already found him, filling up the hallway, squeezing in, jostling against each other for the opportunity to get to this moron who thought he could just walk into their bar. Ribeye sighs, and draws the bowie knife from his belt.

The crowd settles down, and shuffles aside to let someone push their way to the front of the crowd. It’s Tassel, knife drawn, face alight with malicious glee.

“Making a last stand?” Tassel says. “Gonna see how many of us you can take out before you die?”

“ _If_ I die,” Ribeye says.

“Cocky fuck,” Tassel says. “All right, then. Let the kids have this one.”

Ribeye grips his knife tighter, and lowers his center of gravity.

“Come on, man. Don’t send the kids,” Ribeye sighs.

“This’ll be good for them,” Tassel says.

And the kids in question surge forward. Ribeye watches them approach, clumsy and eager, and he can only think one thing: _murderous intent._

_So I might as well make it fast._

Ribeye sidesteps the first swipe, and buries his knife up to the hilt in the kid’s throat. He wrenches it free with a _squelch_ that fills the hallway, and spins underneath another slash. Ribeye’s knife flashes, and an arm goes limp, blood spraying from a long cut along the wrist. A third kid dodges back, taking a few experimental swipes at Ribeye, but before he can get his footing, someone behind him shoves him forward. Off-balance, he lunges for Ribeye’s gut.

Ribeye dodges back, coils like a snake, and lunges forward, plunging his knife into another throat. His blade gets stuck on something ( _Bone,_ his long years of killing men whispers to him, _wedged between two vertebrae_ ), and he twists and turns the body as a human shield, absorbing stabs and angry slashes from more knife-wielding assailants.

Finally, Ribeye’s knife comes free, but he stumbles, _he stumbles_ , and the first of the knives finds its mark. Half the length of one blade buries into his shoulder. He raises a hand, as if to ward off the next blow, but for his trouble watches with morbid detachment as a knife passes through his hand. Blood sprays into his face. His own blood.

For a moment, everyone’s quiet. Ribeye stumbles, falls to his knees.

“Take his balls before he passes out,” Tassel nudges one of the boys forward. “I want him to die without balls.”

And then the lights go out.


End file.
